Encircling (2 page)
Authors: Carl Frode Tiller
The unsettled, faintly edgy mood that was generated when Arvid walked into a room was something I actually sensed in your home, too. There was a slight stiffness and artificiality about the way he spoke and behaved. It was as if the apparent air of calm that Arvid radiated represented a standard of behaviour and an ideal that all the family should aim to achieve, and not only the family, but friends of the family too. Most of the members of the Christian community seemed to do their utmost to appear as gentle and kind and full of brotherly love as possible, as if dead set on reminding themselves of how much they cared about one another. At your house I had the feeling that while it was all right to disagree with something, you should never argue; it was even
all right to get annoyed or angry, but it really wasn’t done to raise your voice. All fluctuations in mood and tone had somehow to be played down and smoothed out, not only the troughs, but the crests as well. It was great to be happy, but you didn’t need to make a song and dance about it, so to speak, a smile was sufficient. And if, even so, someone did get carried away, the others would fall ostentatiously quiet for a few seconds, or they would smile pleasantly, then change the subject completely.
But despite, or maybe because of, this unspoken insistence on constant self-control, violent emotional outbursts did occasionally occur and once, when I was at your house, I witnessed one such outburst. Your mother had just finished washing the floor when Arvid came in and walked right across it in boots caked with clay. Then I caught a glimpse of the Berit that Mum had told me about. Mind you, it was no small thing for her to have somebody walk into the house in mucky boots right after she’d finished cleaning it. For housewives like your mother and mine it was a point of honour to keep an immaculate house, and they expected their husbands, neighbours and anyone else to appreciate all their hard work. My own mum even went so far as to leave the mop and bucket standing in the hall for a whole day after she’d done the cleaning, so that everybody who came in would be sure to see them and comment on how fresh and spotless she kept the place. Seen in that light, to go tramping across Berit’s newly washed floor in muddy boots was to treat her like dirt.
All the same, the fury that Berit unleashed on Arvid when he walked in wearing mucky boots was completely out of proportion to the crime he’d committed. “You dirty fucking pig!” she screamed at him, and just hearing someone use that
voice and those words in your home made me jump and then sit there open-mouthed. I was even more astonished when she swept everything off the kitchen counter. Her forearm swished like a scythe across the worktop; cups, bowls, glasses and cutlery fell to the floor with a deafening crash and when a terrified Arvid gathered his wits enough to ask what on earth had got into her, she flung out her arms, grinned manically and, said: “I’m only doing the same as you, making sure I’ve plenty to do this evening.” Then she burst into tears.
I never heard of you giving way to similar outbursts and I can’t imagine you doing so. Like I say, at school or when you were with friends you were more the strong, silent type, and you had taken this even further at home, adopting a cold, almost stony manner, particularly towards Arvid. It wasn’t that you were directly hostile, more as if you’d taken the insistence on self-control to the extreme, as if you’d decided not to show any emotion at all, and your manner was often formal, bordering on mechanical. If, for example, Arvid asked you to do him a favour, you would do as he asked without a murmur, you didn’t answer him, didn’t even look at him, you simply got up and did as he asked, then went back to what you’d been doing. You behaved as if he was your boss and not your stepfather. And when he spoke to you and tried to start a conversation, you would often reply in words of one syllable and in a flat, indifferent voice. “Fine,” you would say, if he asked how one of our trips to the cottage had gone. “No!” you would answer if he asked if we’d caught any fish.
In such situations I often felt sorry for him. He would smile and act as if it didn’t bother him, but I saw how it hurt him, you being so offhand with him. When I confronted you with this on one of our walks, you got surprisingly het up about it, I remember. You couldn’t stand it, you said, his friendliness
towards you, his endless patience. You didn’t believe in the love that all of this was supposed to be proof of and you didn’t know how to defend yourself against it. You could also feel sorry for him, you could be overwhelmed with guilt when he showered you with kindness. You said you often felt pressured into being nice in return, but you didn’t want to – not because you were still jealous of him for marrying your mother, but because being pleasant to him made you feel as though you were losing sight of yourself and becoming the person he wanted you to be. He had always tried to mould you, to form your character, you said. His methods were just a bit more subtle now. When you were younger he had read and told you stories from the Bible, he had subscribed to
The Blue Anemone
, a Christian children’s magazine, for you, took you to church and Sunday school and scared the wits out of you with tales of the Devil and eternal damnation when you said your prayers together in the evening. He had done all he could to lead you onto what he believed was the right path, but none of it had done any good, so now, instead, he was deliberately using the power of example and trying to ingratiate himself with you. He was kind and affectionate because he saw this as the only way to win you over, you said, and it wasn’t just him: the whole of the Christian community to which your family belonged was involved in this conversion project, they prayed for you, they tried to talk Berit into making a bigger effort to get you to join the church youth groups (especially the choir, since you weren’t a bad singer) and were nigh on shameless in their idealization of the Christian way of life.
Although I thought you were being unfair to Arvid by cold-shouldering him the way you did, I was impressed by the strength of your resistance to him and the rest of the
Christian community. Your mother they had managed to “tame”, as my mum put it. She was a secret smoker, though (I remember the half-disintegrated butts floating in the toilet and the smoker’s breath she tried to camouflage with the aid of chewing gum, usually Orbit, but sometimes Trident), and you suspected that she let her old self off the leash a bit on those rare occasions when she visited her old girlfriends on Otterøya, but that she had changed her ways and truly accepted Jesus, of that everyone was certain. For a while she had even attended meetings at the home of one of Arvid’s aunts, but that had proved too much of a good thing. She couldn’t bear to sit for hours, embroidering some prize for the raffle at the next church bazaar, while drinking coffee, eating waffles with brown goat’s cheese and listening to women twenty and thirty years older than herself who laughed themselves silly and thought they were being really naughty if they dared to say the word “fart”, as she put it.
But no matter how hard Arvid and the others tried, they couldn’t “tame” you. Quite the reverse, in fact: the harder they tried, the farther they drove you away from them and when they were at their most zealous you used to refer to Arvid and his cronies in almost hateful terms. You tried to assume a wry and slightly indifferent tone, but behind the grin and the laughter lay rage, frustration and sadness and you spent many a long evening at our house, delaying going home until you were sure that Arvid would be in bed. Neither of us ever mentioned that this was why it could be eleven, twelve or half-past twelve before you started yawning and saying that, well, it was a school day tomorrow, but I knew this was the reason and you knew that I knew, and I could tell just by looking at you that you appreciated that I was there for you and never asked questions. As far as I was concerned that
went without saying, and I knew you would do exactly the same for me if the day ever came when I needed someone to be there for me.
I place my hand on the doorhandle and press it down, try to pull the door to me, but nothing happens. It’s locked, but she never used to lock the door, so this is something new she’s started doing. So many darkies, she says, roaming the streets since those asylum flats were built, she doesn’t dare not lock the door. I put a finger to the doorbell and press it, once, then again. Stick my hands in my trouser pockets and try to look casual. Take them out again, place them on the banister, ease myself up onto it and sit there, gaze at the yellow frosted glass in the front door, wait a moment, but she doesn’t open up, so I hop down again. I’ll have to fetch the key and let myself in, the spare key will be hanging where it’s always hung, I suppose. I walk round to the shed, flip up the latch and open the door, which emits a long, plaintive creak. Sounds like I’ll have to oil the hinges while I’m here.
“Well, hello,” I suddenly hear Mum say. “It’s you, is it?”
I turn and look at her. She’s standing in the doorway, looking a little tired. Strange how old she’s got lately. She stands there smiling faintly at me.
“So you are home” I say.
“Of course I’m home.”
“You took so long to come to the door, I thought you must be out gallivanting,” I say, closing the shed door behind me.
And she laughs that mournful laugh of hers.
“Oh, and where would I go?” she says, smiling sadly at me, as if to let me know how seldom she gets out of the house now, let me know how lonely she is. I’ve only just got here and she’s started already.
“Ah, now how would I know that? You could be having a high old time of it for all I know,” I say, trying to make a joke of it.
“Oh, you think so, do you?” she asks, laughing her mournful laugh again. “No, I think my gallivanting days are pretty much over.”
I look at her, say nothing. She always has to start with this, I’ve only been here half a minute and here she goes, it’s so bloody tiring, but I keep smiling, walk up to her with a smile on my face, I’ll just have to ignore her moaning, there’s no point in saying anything. I lay a hand on her shoulder, give her a hug. Tobacco fumes waft across my face and I feel her hard cheekbone bump lightly against mine. She places a hand lightly on my upper arm, barely touching me, then takes it away again almost immediately, positions herself by the door and gives a flourish of her hand, as if ushering me in.
“Do please come in!” she says.
“Thank you,” I say, stepping into the sweltering hall. A fly buzzes on the windowsill, butting gently against the glass of the little hall window every now and again.
“Well, this is a pleasant surprise, I must say.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” I say, looking at her and smiling, then I bend down and take off my shoes.
“I’ve got coffee out on the veranda,” she says, pointing to the veranda with one hand and closing the hall door with the other. “Go on out and have a seat, I’ll fetch you a cup!”
“Oh, that sounds good, I’m dying for a coffee,” I say, trying to sound cheery, upbeat, trying somehow to lift her spirits.
I wander into the living room, casually, with my hands in my pockets. Sunlight slants through the window and a grey, shimmering veil of tobacco smoke ripples over the coffee table. I stroll out onto the veranda, sit down on one of the patio chairs and run an eye over the garden. The flowerbed is a little overgrown and the grass is long. I might cut the grass later, give her a bit of a hand. Then Mum comes out onto the veranda, a floorboard creaking under her foot as she steps on it.
“Ah, well,” she says, in a voice that’s self-consciously bright, the sort of voice designed to gloss over something, then she glances anxiously at me and gives a quick smile. “At least you gave it a go, eh!” she says, setting a coffee cup in front of me.
I look at her, not immediately sure what she’s getting at.
“And we all have to make some mistakes in life!” she says in that false, supposedly cheery voice. And then I see what she’s getting at, she’s acting as if she thinks I’ve given up on my music and that’s why I’m here and not on tour, she’s trying to give me the idea that she thinks I’ve thrown in the towel, and she’s pretending to be relieved, pretending to be pleased, so that I’ll feel guilty when I tell her I haven’t given up after all. I’m no longer in the band with Lars and Anders, that’s true, but she doesn’t know anything about that, it’s all an act on her side, all this, and anyway, I haven’t given up, I’m going to go on trying.
“That’s that, then,” she says.
“Mum!” I say, trying to smile, to humour her.
She acts as if she hasn’t heard me.
“Ah, well, that’s how it goes, eh!” is all she says, avoiding my eye, smiling faintly.
“Mum!” I say again, a little louder. “A couple of gigs were cancelled and we had a few days off, so I thought I’d come and see you,” I say, and leave it at that, can’t bring myself to tell her that I’ve left the band. That would only make her even more convinced that it was a mistake to give it a try.
One beat.
“You’d better help yourself!” she says, just ignoring me, not even looking at me, she simply bends down, picks up the coffee-pot and places it on the table in front of me, gives the glimmer of a smile. “I’m liable to spill it,” she says with an attempt at a little laugh. “I’ve changed my medicine and these new pills make my hands awfully shaky.”
I lower my eyes, stifle a little sigh, glance up, am about to tell her again that I haven’t stopped playing, but I stop myself, there’s no point. I brace myself and look up at her.
“Have you told the doctor?” I ask, pick up the coffee-pot and pour for both of us: strong, black boiled coffee. I look up at her, see that mournful face with the affectedly plucky smile, feel annoyance growing inside me.
“Nah!” she says, and now she sounds almost indignant, curling her lip slightly and waggling her head, so that she looks indignant, too.
“Well, you should!” I say.
“Nah! Why would I do that? There’s always some side effect, no matter what pills I take,” she says.
There’s silence for a moment. And then she seems to realize that she’s gone too far, takes a deep breath as she leans across the table.